Dorothy Taubman

Dorothy Taubman (August 16, 1917 – April 3, 2013) was an American music teacher, lecturer and founder of the Taubman Institute of Piano, who developed the "Taubman Approach" to piano playing. Her approach to piano technique was based on an analysis of the motions needed for virtuosity and musical expression, but at first earned a reputation through its high rate of success in curing playing injuries. It provoked controversy by questioning the physiological soundness of some tenets of traditional piano teaching.

Taubman directed the Dorothy Taubman Institute of Piano at Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1976 to 2002. Formerly a professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music of Queens College and a professor at Temple University, she has been featured in numerous articles and interviewed in the Boston Globe, The New York and the Los Angeles Times, Piano Quarterly, Piano and Keyboard, and Clavier magazines. Among others, Taubman has been noted for her work with injured musicians including the celebrated American pianist Leon Fleisher, who was forced to play with only one hand for many years due to injuries he sustained playing at the piano; with the piano teacher Edna Golandsky, who was Taubman's principal teaching assistant and associate director of the Institute; and with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky, chair of the Piano Department at the Juilliard School.

Besides offering a rational, diagnostic system aimed at solving the musical and physiological problems of piano interpretation, the techniques Taubman pioneered have been used therapeutically to treat repetitive strain injuries related to piano playing, and generally to rehabilitate injured pianists. Her techniques have been adapted to computer keyboard typing.

Taubman was best known for her development of a new piano technique, which she called coordinate motion. Her teaching method springs from a best-practice theoretical model which defines the biomechanical roles and conditions necessary to move efficiently at a musical instrument. These parameters are:

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